High School Hype: Magnitude of national attention felt by at least one local team

Joel Weckerly, Courier Columnist

Published
7:00 pm CDT, Monday, August 28, 2006

In fact, someone might be considered out of the loop if he'd never heard of the Hoover Bucs - a team Sports Illustrated tagged number one as part of its 2006 high school football preview inside this week's issue. Even those who don't read SI have likely seen an ad for the new MTV series "Two-a-Days," which chronicles Hoover's run to a fourth consecutive state title in 2005.

To the remaining few of you, the word "Hoover" means nothing more than a trusty vacuum, but I'll bet a Dustbuster you've heard of "Friday Night Lights." Maybe not the soon-to-be NBC series, but surely the 2004 movie about the Odessa Permian Panthers. That film was based on the 1989 book by Buzz Bissinger - perhaps the one thing we can trace the explosion of national high school football exposure back to.

After that it was the internet, which led to everything from smack-talk message boards to recruiting web sites to blogs - any avenue to get the word out about the nation's top players and teams. In today's world, tracking down a Southlake Carroll depth chart is as easy as finding UT's.

The boom of national prep football coverage hasn't gone unnoticed by those who have been around the sport for years. The Woodlands head coach Mark Schmid did a double-take when he flipped through this week's SI, which labeled TW's Oct. 26 district meeting with Lufkin as one of the "10 Games to Watch" in the country this fall.

"It's very flattering to be considered one of the top games, because it adds to the excitement of the whole deal," Schmid admitted. "It does seem like in the last five or six years the exposure that high school kids are getting is starting to rival that of the big college programs. It's come a long way."

That Lufkin game, which will likely decide the 15-5A championship, will be broadcast nationally on ESPN2. The magnitude of it almost overshadows The Woodlands' first TV appearance of the year.

This Saturday the Highlanders will square off against Smithson Valley in the Texas Football Classic at the Alamodome in San Antonio. The season opener will be broadcast live on Fox Sports Net, which probably means extra butterflies for every player on the field.

The accompanying exposure has surprised even well-known Smithson Valley head coach Larry Hill.

"We get calls from some people, and it's like, 'Holy cow, how do they know we exist?'" Hill said. "It can be exciting, but on one hand it's a lot of pressure. There are a lot of people talking about them through websites and everything, and when you have people criticizing 16- and 17-year-old kids, you wonder about the fairness of that. One goes with the other."

Schmid at least hopes that the pressure from Saturday's game (as well as the rest of the season) will be relieved by prior experience in daunting atmospheres.

"We had the good fortune in 2003 of playing on Fox Sports to start season," Schmid said. "We played in the ('03) state championship game and that was on TV as well. With a lot of our kids that stuff is fresh in their minds. They've come to not necessarily expect it, but it's not something that's just out of the ordinary. I guess that's a good thing from a coach's standpoint when those things don't break the focus of what we're trying to do."

How much bigger could prep football possibly get? Some say not enough while others argue too much. Schmid helped illustrate what the game is becoming:

"I think there's a lot of positives in promoting the game of football, but at the same time I think it's a little bit scary that some of these high school sports are being treated like professional sports now."

But at least we know it will never get to that point - until, of course, they create high school fantasy football.